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A pair of would-be robbers targeting Columbia students in upper Manhattan seem to be rather picky as they prowl.

Twice at 526 114th St., and once at 556 114th St., the suspects demanded the victims hand over their iPhones, police said.

The first victim complied, but the second only had a Droid, according to police. The thieves apparently didn’t want a Droid — so they took cash instead.

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It gets under my skin because it is a pompous, privileged, insulting, and myopic viewpoint which reeks of class warfare — and it is indicative of a growing sentiment I see amongst people in the tech community.

(source)

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A young mother claims Transportation Security Administration agents mocked her for 40 minutes and made her stand in a glass enclosure in front of other airline passengers because she requested an alternate screening process so her breast milk would not be exposed to radiation.

Stacey Armato sued the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA and four TSA agents for false imprisonment, false light, intentional infliction of emotional distress and federal torts.

[..]

Armato says she has retrieved most of the footage of this incident on video, but about 30 minutes of tape are missing, “including where Wiseman demanded plaintiff’s personal information on a piece of paper which he put in his pocket and kept, as well as the portion where Wiseman photographed plaintiff’s breast milk.”

How… convenient for Wiseman.

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Universal Music Group has responded to Megaupload’s request for a temporary restraining order barring the music giant from further interference with the distribution of its "Mega Song." UMG insists that it had a right to take down the video—not under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as Megaupload had assumed, but under a private contractual arrangement between UMG and YouTube.

UMG’s filing raises more questions than it answers. Most obviously, the firm has not explained why it took down the video in the first place. But the filing also raises deeper questions about UMG’s effort to essentially opt out of the DMCA takedown rules. UMG seems to believe it can take down videos even if it doesn’t hold the copyright to them, and that when UMG takes a video down from YouTube, the owner of that video can’t avail herself of even the weak protections against takedown abuse provided by the DMCA.

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Discovered only two weeks ago, the kamikazi comet Lovejoy is currently on course for a fiery demise, plunging toward the sun. But before this icy, 200-meter-wide visitor disintegrates, there is a small chance it may become visible to the naked eye during broad daylight today.

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This just in from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory website: Comet Lovejoy survived its close pass of the sun and has reemerged on the other side of the star. Here is a short clip of the fortunate comet’s re-apparition:

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Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

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It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told them. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.

– Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy

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Research In Motion Ltd.’s top executives cut their salaries to $1 as they delivered yet more dismal news to investors, telling the world the product that was supposed to save the company will come out almost a year later than promised.

Most CEO’s would give themselves a huge exit bonus. They set a great example!